Solution
Balancing national security with economic opportunity
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Contact UsThe Challenge
01.Like many Western governments, one Adarga customer was facing a major policy challenge – how best to balance national security concerns with its extensive economic engagement with China.
The Adarga Research Institute (ARI) helped them identify two specific requirements: a replicable framework for decision-making, supported by a dedicated research tool that would facilitate rapid familiarisation with relevant policy areas for experts and non-experts, and allow more effective communication of this across government.
The Solution
02.The ARI team has deep subject-matter expertise on China’s international economic priorities and Western-China relations, and is able to draw on an international network of experts from industry, policy, and academia. Combined with their close familiarity with using Adarga’s Vantage software for research on China and Western-China relations, this enabled the team to identify what would be required of an effective decision-making framework and illustrate its utility through a case study of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The ARI team was also able to show how Adarga Vantage could be effectively deployed across government as a policy-relevant research tool, allowing the user to rapidly search across large volumes of unstructured data from a wide range of English, Chinese and other language sources.
The Results.
03.The outputs included a demonstrable workflow for decision-making and associated research based on a dedicated Vantage environment, alongside a report illustrating the model itself. The ARI also provided the Belt Road Initiative case study, which would help others across government understand how to use the frame-work and the research tool, as well as the benefits of doing so in terms of their day-to-day work.
The research yielded a number of unique insights, including a breakdown of Western and Chinese rhetoric around ‘decoupling’ and ‘derisking’, which helped identify key points of political divergence. Overall, the report developed a decision-making framework based on conditions of possibility for specific policy decisions. Taking an original problem statement from the customer regarding the potential for a Western equivalent to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the team identified the reliance of the BRI on China’s current account surplus and the lack of this on the part of the customer country and its allies. The customer was therefore able to conclude that countering China’s influence via the BRI would not be best facilitated by trying to replicate it.
Having satisfied themselves of the efficacy of both the framework and research tool, the ARI customer has been promoting both across central government customers, generating significant interest in larger-scale adoption.
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